Sociological Aspects 
talk (and also by MacKay and Price), namely, that we are 
going to have many more people thrown out of work in the 
ordinary sense, because work is growing increasingly techno- 
logical and automated. ‘This means (among many other things) 
that we shall have to occupy more and more people with 
exploring their own inner potentialities, their inner space. 
Lederberg: I think we are here to try to continue to build a 
science of man. I am impressed by a few quantitative considera- 
tions that we are beginning to discover which help to define man 
in a different context. One important fact is that you can 
describe man’s genetic content in terms of something like 
10,000 million bits of information about the choices in the 
construction of a nucleotide. Another number which ought to 
impress us is the information transfer rate of fifty bits per 
second which seems to characterize us as individuals. ‘This is 
extremely important because it is perhaps the one quantum 
from which we could start to build a theory of social interaction. 
It would help us to define the nature of the optimum unit of 
social organization. 
We are not thinking enough about society’s communication 
network, yet our urgent need is to communicate with one 
another. Communication sets some sort of bounds to what is 
possible. MacKay started by saying he was going to discuss the 
state of the art of communication rather than speculate about 
it. In fact, in our present state of communication, as he 
promptly pointed out, any statement of the state of the art is 
only a speculation. We do not understand what is happening 
and we have not got the necessary institutions to begin to keep 
up with the growth of our various communities. I have 
become, as everyone else has, terribly alarmed by the rate of 
population growth which is becoming increasingly incommen- 
surate with our capacity to communicate with one another. I 
am even more impressed by the explosive increase in world 
culture; there is certainly, as Price mentioned, a much greater 
increase in the number of highly literate people than there is of 
the population as a whole; the number of reasonably literate 
people is rising by a factor of 100 or 1,000 over a period of a 
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